


And Trouble Ran Close Behind Him

by Remki



Category: Doctor Who, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-19
Updated: 2011-01-19
Packaged: 2017-10-14 21:23:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/153597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Remki/pseuds/Remki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Prompt was Jim meets the Doctor and that's why he likes Astronomy. I took it a few steps further. Sometimes the Doctor shouldn't interfere...</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Trouble Ran Close Behind Him

He was only three, the first time he met the Doctor. Some would say too young to remember, but Jimmy was good at remembering things, even if he couldn’t say the mans name at the time. He called him Docda, and it seemed to amuse the Timelord. They played a game where Jimmy wasn’t allowed to look anywhere but up, and name off as many constellations as he could remember while Docda carried him across the wide expanse of the family’s backyard, and out into the dark night. Jimmy could only remember Orion, because his daddy had showed it to him during their camping trip that summer. He was too busy playing to notice the flames rise up through the windows of the family home.

The police found him at a bus stop asleep, wrapped up in a blanket covered in stars.  
\--------  
He was eight when he met the Doctor again. The Moriarty’s –he could never bring himself to call them his _parents_ \- had sent James and himself to math camp; he also couldn’t bring himself to say “math camp” without rolling his eyes. He never understood the idea of throwing a bunch of kids into the middle of the woods only to make them do simple calculations. He also didn’t understand how most of the kids didn’t see them as “simple”, either. It was out of sheer boredom that Jim had snuck out of his cabin and trundled off with a torch and some astronomy books into the woods.

He hadn’t meant to get lost. He _wouldn’t_ have been lost if it hadn’t clouded over while he was out. But without the stars or the moon, and no light beside his torch, Jimmy was lost. That’s why, when the sound came –the sound that stirred memories deep inside his mind- he made his way toward it at a run. When he was close, he could see a blue light flashing slowly, and suddenly he knew exactly what. And who, it was when the door opened.

“Doctor!” Jimmy cried. The Doctor started, and stared out into the dark woods for a moment, before he saw the small boy only half illuminated by the Tardis interior lights.

“Hello, there!” the Doctor said, his eyebrows wagging up and down as he examined Jimmy from top to bottom. “And just who are you? Oh, wait, no, let me see, I know you! I…know…you….Jin, jam, joan, jim—Jimmy! It’s little Jimmy!” the man pranced out the door and stopped in front of Jimmy, his hands shoved into his suit pockets, rocking on his heels. “How are you Jimmy?”

“Lost,” Jimmy answered simply. The Doctor took a deep breath through his nose and breathed out in a happy sigh.

“Ahhhh, you’re not _lost_! You’re in the woods! No one’s really lost in the woods! It’s not British,” he said with a half smile.

“I’m _not_ British,” Jimmy answered flatly. It was a sore spot for the boy, one that James repeatedly poked at. His American accent had all but completely disappeared in the four years he had lived with the Moriarty’s, but even just the occasional slip was enough for James to pick on.

“Ah, well, it doesn’t matter. Neither am I!”

The Doctor winked at the boy, and Jimmy couldn’t help but smile. He tried to cover it, and asked “What are you even doing here, anyway?”

“Oh, you know, this and that. Why are _you_ here?”

Jim stared down at his shoes and kicked the soil at his feet in anger.

“Math camp,” he mumbled. The Doctor held a hand to his ear, and Jimmy repeated himself. “ _Math_ camp! It’s sooo stupid.”

The Doctor made a face and knelt down on one knee. “Math camp! Doesn’t sound stupid at all, why would you say something like that?”

“Everyone’s an idiot! They act like this stuff’s hard, but it’s just calculus! I didn’t even want to be here in the first place.”

“Now that is too bad. So you wouldn’t want, say, a ride back to the camp?”

Jimmy stared incredulously over the Doctors shoulder at the open door of the Tardis. At the angle he was, all he could see was the light streaming through the door crack, and the blue paneling.  
“What, in that thing?”

“Thing?! Oh, this is more than just some thing, Jimmy my boy! This here is a TARDIS! She can take you anywhere and anywhen you want to go!”

“You mean like a time machine?”

“EXACTLY like a time machine!”

“Sooooo if you can go anywhere, then why not go somewhere fun? I don’t want to go back to the camp.”

The Doctor smiled, and was just about to say something, when suddenly something went ‘PING’ in the Doctors pocket. The Doctor looked and started shuffling about in his trousers before finally finding the right pocket and pulling out a ridiculous looking machine. He stared down at it for a moment in extreme concentration, and his eyebrows rose by inches as the machine went ping again, and yet again.

“Oh. Oh. Ooohkay, that’s not good,” he said loudly, and threw himself to his feet in a hurry. In an instant he had dove back into the TARDIS and shut the door. Jimmy was left in the dark as the sound of the TARDIS began to ring out through the woods. Before Jimmy could open his mouth to say anything, though, the sound suddenly stopped, and the Doctor appeared again.

“Jimmy! Hold on! Here!”

Something came flying out of the TARDIS and landed at Jimmy’s feet. He bent down and picked it up, then looked back at the Doctor. The Doctor winked and smiled.

“Just for when you’re lost,” he said. Jimmy looked back down at the object. It was a compass, but where the N would be, the words “Right Way” were inscribed. Jimmy looked up to thank the Doctor, but it was too late. The door was shut, and in an instant he was gone.

\-------

He was twelve the next time he met the Doctor. He never did find out how, or why, but there he was, pretending to be a teacher at Brighton Academy for the Gifted. When break came, he wandered up to the front of the class.

“Hellooo…Doctor,” he said sotto voce. The Doctor raised an eyebrow and leaned forward.

“Hello…Jimmy,” he answered.

“It’s Jim, actually,” he said, and licked his lips before asking quietly. “What are you doing here?”

“Teaching Literature, what else? What are YOU doing here?”

Jim sneered. “Learning Literature, apparently. Though I have to say it’s a bit of a joke. I mean, Hamlet? A comedy?”

“Hey!” the Doctor frowned, and shut the book he had been staring at with a snap. “I’ll have you know, I was there when it was written! It’s been played wrong since the start.”

Jim rolled his eyes and suppressed a laugh. “Riiiiiight. So what are you really doing here?”

The Doctor was about to open his mouth, when from somewhere on the other end of the campus the sound of an explosion stopped them both in their tracks. In an instant the Doctor had jumped over his desk, and was out the door. But the Doctor was fast, and in an instant Jim had lost him in the maze of school hallways. Desperate, Jim reached into his pocket, where he kept the one thing he never let off his person: his compass. He followed the compass needle, knowing that it would lead him right, until he spotted the doctor running down a side corridor. But by the time Jim had caught up to the Doctor at the cafeteria doors, they were thrown shut by some kind of force and locked. Jim banged on the door and threw his weight against it, but it wouldn’t budge. He was about to go and get his janitors keys –he had made copies nearly the first week he arrived at the Academy- when another explosion rang out, and some kind of force threw him back against the wall, hitting his head. He only had enough time to think “damn” before he blacked out.

The smell of burning hair and a patting against his cheek woke him up. He opened his eyes slowly, and waited while they adjusted and fixated on the face of the Doctor hovering above him. The Doctor, on his part, was covered in black smudges and a small puff of smoke floated away from his hair. When he saw Jims eyes open, he grinned.

“Jimmy, my boy! You’re awake!”

“It’s Jim, Doctor,” he muttered, and coughed. He sat up slowly, his head throbbing, and looked around. They were outside and it was night. Above them the stars were glowing brightly, and the only thing within miles that he could see was the light of the Tardis, and the distant lights of a city.

“Where are we?” he asked, looking around them in surprise.

“I had to get you away from the school. It was a little…hot…” The Doctor reached up and extinguished the small smolder of hair.

“What about the other students?” he asked.

“Oh, they all got out. You were the only one left.”

Jim stood up, dizzily, and shook his head to clear it. “Wait. How did we get all the way out here?”

The Doctor grinned, and motioned to the TARDIS. “I told you before. Anywhere and anywhen.” He stared proudly at the blue box, and Jim looked at with sudden awe and pain. All those years, he had waited for that long-procrastinated ride, and when he finally got it, he had been unconscious. It stung, deeply. He turned his gaze back to the Doctor, and stared at him hopefully.

“So, if it can go anywhere, then why were you at my school?”

The Doctor shrugged. “I guess I just seem to find trouble.”

There was an awkward pause.

“Take me with you!” Jim burst out. He had planned to find a better way to say it, but it came out before he could. The Doctor raised his eyebrows and stared down at him in surprise.

“You said you can go anywhere! You can go to the stars, and see them up close, and go back in history, and—and EVERYTHING. And I am SO BORED with this place. No ones smart enough, and nothing interesting _ever_ happens. Please!—Take me with you.”

Jim knew the answer before the Doctor even opened his mouth. He could feel his face crumpling, but at the look of pity in the Doctors eyes, anger flared up and evaporated any tears that had formed. He forced his face to go blank, but it was too late. The Doctor had seen. He knelt down in front of Jim, and took him by the forearms.

“Jimmy, I…I just can’t. I can’t bring anyone with me, not anymore. Trouble…it follows me, always. It’s not safe.”

The boy shook the Doctors hands off, and squinted his eyes hard at the time traveler.

“It’s _Jim_ ,” he said sharply, and turned away. Behind him, the Doctor stood up, and Jim could nearly feel the sadness rolling off the man. He ignored it. He didn’t care. The Doctor cleared his throat.  
“I could….I could take you home, at least.”

Jim sneered. “Don’t bother,” he said, and held up his hand, where the compass was still nestled in his grip. “I can find my own way.”

“But—“

Jim’s fist clenched tightly and he bit his lip to keep from yelling. “Go. Away.” He spat. There was silence behind him for nearly two minutes, but when it became obvious that Jim wasn’t going to turn around, he could hear the Doctor shuffle towards the TARDIS. There was an inhale of breath, but Jim cut him off before the Doctor could try and offer a platitude.

“I said leave.”

The sound of the TARDIS door closing was nothing but a sift click. Jim stood with his back to the machine, staring at the sky, and waited until the sound of its take off had faded, and there was nothing but the silence of the countryside. He stayed like that for a while, his eyes not really focusing on anything but the fuzzy glow of stars. After a while, a small smirk lifted the corner of his lip. He flipped open the compass in his hand, and stared down at the little needle as it wavered and turned on its screw, until it finally settled to point in the direction of the town. His smirk grew wider, and he turned away from the lights of the town. Trouble was what always found the Doctor, he had said. And trouble would find him.

Jim would make sure.


End file.
